mfunk9786 wrote:I would really love to know why dissenting or differing opinions by total strangers are interpreted by some people as such a threat.

The reason is biological. People value their opinion as a core part of identity and therefore any disruption of that is cause for distress. The internet which can strip context and tone has exacerbated this. That's why an otherwise innocuous opinion can be become a battleground and if you add in something that's a core part of someone's identity, like Star Wars well that's a time bomb.

Last edited by Big Ben on Thu May 17, 2018 11:31 am, edited 1 time in total.

I like both LE CERCLE ROUGE - have watched it 4 or 5 times - and Melville in general a great deal, but it’s hard for me to see how her description of the film is really all that far off the mark. A lot of her points, especially the overly stylized costuming and lack of women characters, are criticisms that are pretty common even in cinephile circles.

At any rate, she acknowledges that the film fits within the aesthetic of the new AM album, which feels to me like the only “context” her piece really calls for. She’s not trying to write an overview of ‘70s film. It seems to me that if one is inclined to request that she contextualize the films, they should give the same courtesy to the context in which she saw the films in the first place.

mfunk9786 wrote:I would really love to know why dissenting or differing opinions by total strangers are interpreted by some people as such a threat.

I don't have any issue with differing opinions. My issue with the article is how it's mostly descriptive with little actual critical insight about the movies. It's all very dry and superficial, even on movies on which I agree with her. Sure, she isn't saying anything wrong about Le cercle rouge for instance (as Brian wrote), but apart from mostly summarising it, what added value does her writing bring ?

The quote I selected about Le cercle rouge is almost totally descriptive, the few personal elements look like parody ("a guy started snoring next to me, so I'm right saying it's boring !"), and in the end again, only offer very little analysis of the movie.
For instance, she noticed "There is only one female character in this film. She has one line in the entire movie. She says “What is it?” while fully nude." but does nothing with it. Is the movie misogynistic ? Is it a "very manly men"'s movie ? We'll never know because the writer doesn't do anything with this bit. It's turned into a random bit of info, thrown raw, and it remains like this.

Well, personally I don’t have a problem with you finding her uninteresting anymore than I do with her finding the Melville boring. But the implication that she’s doing something wrong kinda bristles, I guess. I feel like you’re doing the same thing to her that you’re accusing her of doing with these films, e.g., not evaluating the context in which it appears.

Not every piece of film writing has to be a deep dive! This piece exists mostly, it seems, to give fans of the band some idea of what the event was like. It’s not a submission to Film Comment.

Well, I don't care about the lack of context. As I wrote, I think movies can be judge on their own merit, and you should be able to judge a movie from the 70s without having lots and lots of knowledge about 70s cinema (to make it simple). I just think that her takes on the movies are, as a whole, too descriptive and not argumentative enough, so that when she concludes this is good and this was boring, it's hard to find her case compelling or convincing.
That's what I'm mostly discussing here. The style and content, I guess, more than the lack of context.

And if the point was to give an idea of what the event was like, then why bothering trying somehow to make small critics of each movies ? Which is why I'm thinking it's either too short or too long. If it was made to be a general review of the event, then, why bothering doing superficial mini-reviews of each movie ? But if you're bothering doing individual reviews, why not taking a bit more time to refine them and go past a beefed-up summary ?

As it is, as domino wrote, it makes the whole thing seeming a bit willfully ignorant, as if the writer is happy showing she doesn't really care about those movies and is happy dismissing some of them so quickly. Not every film writing needs to be a deep dive, but there still is a minimum of compelling to do not to simply be a rehashed summary with a few superficial adjective thrown in it. See again the bit about the woman in Le cercle rouge : it's pointed out, and then ? Nothing. Why pointing it out then ?

I don't know. I wonder if the writer wanted to make such a longer piece in the first place but was giving an improbably word count to reach and had to embroider a lot.

Brian C wrote:Well, personally I don’t have a problem with you finding her uninteresting anymore than I do with her finding the Melville boring. But the implication that she’s doing something wrong kinda bristles, I guess. I feel like you’re doing the same thing to her that you’re accusing her of doing with these films, e.g., not evaluating the context in which it appears.

Not every piece of film writing has to be a deep dive! This piece exists mostly, it seems, to give fans of the band some idea of what the event was like. It’s not a submission to Film Comment.

We are not the target audience (massive understatement), and the author has made absolutely no secret of where she's coming from: she's not pretending to be any kind of 1970s film expert. I suspect if I were to review the same event, I'd focus much more on the films and skip over the music in a couple of sentences, which I imagine would be the preferred approach here... but presumably not there.

Boring---We went because we had free entry after visiting the Louvre. They claimed it was a15 minute walk away - it wasn't, it took a lot longer but as we enjoy walking we didn't mind. However, the visit was a waste of time and we would have demanded our money back if we'd paid.